Three candidates for a coherent, comprehensive account of reality have impressive credentials: materialism, natural teleology and theism. However, several features of the human mind favor theism over materialism and natural teleology: consciousness, our ability to comprehend the cosmos, and our moral evaluations. These features of the mind appear to require a personal (theistic) explanation.

So we can argue from the remarkable character of the human mind to God.

For those who believe in a triune God in whose image human beings are made, we have excellent reason to believe that the mind will have the remarkable powers it does, as these powers are presupposed by our call to be stewards of the rest of the world. The kind of mind we need to be stewards cannot be accounted for by materialism or natural teleology.

So we can argue from God to the remarkable character of the human mind.

Angus Menuge was raised in England, and became an American citizen in 2005. He holds a BA in philosophy from Warwick University, a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Diploma in Christian Apologetics from the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights. He is author of Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science, and many articles on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and Christian apologetics, and is the editor of several collections of essays, on C. S. Lewis, Christ and culture and the scientific vocation. Dr. Menuge will be speaking on March 6 at Ithaca College.